GEM research: achievements and challenges

This article analyzes the content and evolution of research based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project. We conducted a rigorous search of articles published in journals within the Thomson Reuters’ Social Sciences Citation Index^® through an exploratory analysis focused on articles using GEM data. The main findings of this study reveal that the institutional approach is the most commonly used conceptual framework. Also, although there are still few academic publications using GEM data, the number of articles is increasing, as are opportunities for future research.     

Extending the enterprise evolution contextualisation model

Enterprise engineering (EE) emerged as a new discipline to encourage comprehensive and consistent enterprise design. Since EE is multidisciplinary, various researchers study enterprises from different perspectives, which resulted in a plethora of applicable literature and terminology, but without shared meaning. Previous research specifically focused on the fragmentation of knowledge for designing and aligning the information and communication technology (ICT) subsystem of the enterprise in order to support the business organisation subsystem of the enterprise. As a solution for this fragmented landscape, a business-IT alignment model (BIAM) was developed inductively from existing business-IT alignment approaches. Since most of the existing alignment frameworks addressed the alignment between the ICT subsystem and the business organisation subsystem, BIAM also focused on the alignment between these two subsystems. Yet, the emerging EE discipline intends to address a broader scope of design, evident in the existing approaches that incorporate a broader scope of design/alignment/governance. A need was identified to address the knowledge fragmentation of the EE knowledge base by adapting BIAM to an enterprise evolution contextualisation model (EECM), to contextualise a broader set of approaches, as identified by Lapalme. The main contribution of this article is the incremental development and evaluation of EECM. We also present guiding indicators/prerequisites for applying EECM as a contextualisation tool.     

Perceptions of poverty attributions in Europe: a multilevel mixture model approach

The perception of the causes of poverty has long been recognized as a very important factor in the broader study of this social phenomenon. This study covers 15 European Union countries and considers three types of poverty attributions: individualistic, societal, and fatalistic. The individualistic view perception believes the poor are responsible for their situation, the societal perspective blames society for poverty and the fatalistic view considers poverty to be the result of bad luck or fate. A multilevel mixture model with three clusters of countries and six clusters of individuals was identified. Despite the generalization of the social explanations of poverty at the individual or micro level, there are also groups that emphasize more individualistic explanations, blaming the poor for their condition. At the country or macro level, the most developed cluster believes in the individualistic and fatalistic causes of poverty, whereas the least developed clusters explain poverty based on the injustices of society. There is diversity in the way these countries perceive poverty.     

ASSESSING THE EFFECT OF PUBLIC SUBSIDIES ON FIRM R&D INVESTMENT: A SURVEY

This survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public R&D subsidies and private R&D investment over the past five decades. The survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues. We aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity. In particular, we emphasise a set of issues that, in our view, are critical to understanding the potential effect of public R&D subsidies on private R&D spending. Special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm R&D, the constraints faced by the firm (such as financial constraints), and the amount and source of public subsidies. None of these issues have been investigated in depth. We formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field.     

Lost in intervention. The Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson effect on the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998)

We have decomposed the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998) into its trend and cyclical components and used the former to proxy its time-varying equilibrium. Then, we have compared changes in the equilibrium with changes in the Spanish and the USA productivity differentials to identify years that do not fit with the Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis. The greatest maladjustment is found in the 1940s and 1950s, decades of strong exchange rate intervention in Spain. Conversely, the link between equilibrium and differentials adjusts to the hypothesis when using the non-intervened peseta/dollar exchange rate on the Tangier black market. These contrasting results back up the idea that exchange rate intervention, so common in developing countries, might explain their scanter evidence in favour of the HBS effect.     

Technology Exploitation Paths: Combining Technological and Complementary Resources in New Product Development and Licensing

Technological resources in the form of patents, trade secrets, and know‐how have become key assets for modern enterprises. This paper addresses a critical issue in technology and innovation management, namely, the commercial exploitation of technological resources resulting from research and development (R&D) investments. Extracting economic value from these resources by maximizing the benefits for shareholders is an extremely challenging task because technological resources are intangible, idiosyncratic, uncertain, predominantly tacit, and with poorly defined property rights. In their attempt to extract the maximum value from their technological resources, firms increasingly combine their internal exploitation through new product development (NPD) with external exploitation through licensing. However, most existing studies on NPD and technology licensing have treated the two exploitation paths independently and in isolation, which has resulted in two separate research streams using different theories and addressing different managerial challenges. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to filling this gap by developing and testing a comprehensive conceptual framework that simultaneously considers the antecedents affecting the successful implementation of NPD and licensing strategies as well as their consequences on firm profitability. The paper in particular investigates the effects of the interplay between technological resources and three types of complementary resources, marketing, manufacturing, and relational. We test the model using structural equation modeling on a sample of 733 Spanish manufacturing firms observed from 2003 to 2007. The data provide support for the existence of different paths to market firm technologies: an internal path, whereby the ownership of technological resources fully explains NPD performance, and an external path, whereby high intensity of marketing and relational resources reinforces the positive effect of technological resources on licensing performance. This sustains the relevance of the resource‐based value‐enhancing effects of complementary resources in licensing, as opposed to the motivation‐reducing effects advanced by transaction cost‐based literature. Moreover, the empirical analysis shows a substitution effect between NPD and licensing, whereby their simultaneous pursuit at intense levels is associated with lower profit margins. This provides evidence of the much theorized, but seldom tested, rent dissipation effect. These findings offer several contributions to research on licensing, NPD, open innovation, and the resource‐based view of the firm. On a managerial level, they suggest that achieving maximum value from proprietary technologies may not entail exploiting them both through external and internal paths. Managers are also informed that the resource combinations that enhance licensing performance include marketing and relational resources.     

Evolving splines and seasonal unit roots in weekly agricultural prices

The univariate statistical properties of agricultural price series need to be examined as a first step in the analysis of price transmission mechanisms. However, in the case of weekly price series, increasingly available, the testing procedures usually applied in this step are not suitable to deal with evolving seasonal effects. In this study, a method of testing for seasonal unit roots in weekly series of agricultural prices is described. When the deterministic seasonal component does not remain constant over time, the restricted evolving spline model (RESM) is shown to be a useful parametric formulation to capture the deterministic seasonal pattern. Therefore, the RESM model should be included as a deterministic component in auxiliary regression for unit root tests at seasonal frequencies. This proposal is applied to three weekly series of Canary Islands banana prices. From the standard seasonal unit root tests, the null hypothesis is failed to be rejected at the 5% or 10% significance level at some seasonal frequencies for each one of the series. Once critical values are obtained by simulation exercises when the RESM model is included, the hypotheses of unit root are rejected at each one of the seasonal frequencies for all of the three series.